Chapter 11 A Memory She Did Not Live

Cleo began, in the last week of her second fortnight, to go through her own life the way she went through the annex, line by line, looking for what did not agree. She started with the things she was surest of, because a person who is losing the ground under her does not start with the ground. She started with her mother, and she found her mother intact: the smell of the ward, the particular green of the corridor at the facility, the way her mother had said Cleo's name in the last month, as if from the far end of a long hall. These were hers. She could not have said how she knew, except that they had the grain of weather rather than the grain of a story. Rain is not a story. Rain is rain. She moved outward, and the ground got softer. She found a memory of a room with a crack in the plaster shaped like a bird and a lamp with a burn on its shade, and she could put herself in it, and she could reach out and touch the burn, and it was hers the way the rain was hers. But she had heard the description of that room read aloud from a screen on her first hold night, and Dez had read it to her from a log at six in the morning, and the two facts sat in her like stones in a pocket, and she could not tell which had come first, the memory or the paragraph. She went at it another way. She took the notebook out of her bag and wrote down, without looking at anything, the ten things she would say if a stranger asked her to describe her childhood in ten sentences. Then she went to the terminal in berth five, before the shift changed, and searched the narrative bank for the words, and found three of her ten sentences already there, in the words she had used, in the order she would have used them. She found a fourth that was close. The bank's version had a man in a coat standing at a door, and the door was red, and the man did not come in, and the entry's category was *departure*, and its date ran back past her intake to a cohort she had never heard of. She had not included the man in her ten sentences. But she remembered him now, standing at the red door, and she remembered the coat, which was the coat from the bus, and she understood with a slow, cold clarity that the coat had travelled from a paragraph about a bus into the memory of a door that she had never opened, and that she had been the one who carried it there. She did not tell anyone, that week, about the man in the coat. She wrote him in the notebook with a question mark, and she drew a line under him, and she went on with the count. On the eighteenth night, a quiet night, she woke before the 03:00 check with her left wrist under the pillow, and she turned the cuff over in the dark and looked at the place beneath it, where the skin had gone pale and numb from twelve days of the same band in the same spot, and it occurred to her that she had never, in all the weeks, once looked at the skin under the cuff, and that neither, apparently, had anyone else, and that a cuff is a record of a wrist and not a wrist. She took the scar test the way she took every test, which was by asking for the document rather than the opinion. The consent form gave a participant the right to request a copy of her own intake file on twenty-four hours' notice, and she gave the notice on the nineteenth morning, and Corbell brought the file to the common room the next day in a paper sleeve and watched her open it, which was itself a piece of information. The intake file had nine pages and the ninth was the physical sheet, and the physical sheet had boxes for height and weight and handedness and blood pressure, and near the bottom it had a box headed *distinguishing marks*, and the box had been filled in, in her own handwriting, in the small even hand she used for forms, with five words. *Scar, left forearm, three centimetres.* She read the five words four times. Then she turned her left arm over under the common-room light, in front of a woman who was watching her do it, and the forearm was smooth and pale and continuous from the wrist to the elbow, and there was no scar on it and had not been for nineteen days of cuffs and washing and sleep, and there was no scar on the right arm either, and there was no scar on either ankle, and by the time she had finished checking all four limbs Corbell had looked away and had begun, very deliberately, to count the linen again. A scar is not a memory. That was the thought Cleo held on to for the next two days, because it was the only clean thought available. A memory can be planted, a memory can be sharpened, a memory can be supplied and rehearsed and made to feel like weather, and she had spent three weeks learning that. But a scar is tissue. A scar is the body's own record, kept in collagen, written by a wound that bled, and a body does not misremember a wound and does not stop carrying one because a file says otherwise, and the only two ways to make the forearm in front of her and the five words in the box agree were to fabricate the box or to remove the scar, and the second of those required a knife and a surgeon and a reason, and the first required only a hand that could write like hers. She went back to the ten sentences that week and found that three of them had moved. Not changed. Moved, the way furniture moves in a room you have not entered for a month, so that the room is recognizably the same room and everything in it is in the wrong place. The sentence about her mother's last week now contained a detail she had not put there, a detail about a window and a particular afternoon light, and the detail was good and the detail was wrong and the sentence was still, in every other respect, hers. She began to keep a second list in the notebook, headed *body*, and in the first three days it had six entries. Shoe size. The tooth with the chip in it, which was still chipped. The vaccination mark on her upper arm, which was still there. The scar, which was not. The burn on her right thumb from a kettle, which was there and which she had not thought about in years until she found it and was relieved by it out of all proportion to its size. And a birthmark at the base of her spine, which she could not see and had never been able to see and had been told about once, at nineteen, by a boy whose name she could not now remember, and which she had no way of confirming and no way of letting go. That was the sixth entry and the only one she wrote in pencil, and she wrote beside it, in the margin, the sentence that she would come back to when the last week of the study took the ground out from under her. *A body is the last record. If they can reach the body, then the notebook is just another sheet of paper.* She sat up and looked at her own forearm in the faint blue of the corridor light, and found the scar she had had since she was nine, the one from a bicycle and a chain, the one she could describe to a stranger in ten sentences, and it was not there. The skin was smooth and pale and unmarked, and she sat in the dark holding her own arm and looking at the place where thirty years of her life should have been, and she did not scream, because she had learned in this building that the log hears everything, and the log only reports what it recognizes. ---